New player, any guides?

[Nyalia]

The best way, imo, to level crafters (and gatherers) while doing other things is to do your daily GC turnins every day. These give extremely large exp boosts compared to other methods. They're similar to leves, except they don't take allowances, and they give more exp.


Also, once you get a combat class high enough (41, maybe? I forget - somewhere between 41 and 45), you can start doing Ixali beast tribe quests. The quest to unlock is called "A Bad Bladder." These quests involve crafting and give tons of crafter exp. One of them ("Deliverance") is a version of the GC turnins, except you can only turn in items until you meet a quota (3x of the highest available, or more of the lower level ones available). So, you can do multiple for a single class if you want, unlike GC turnins where you can only do one per class per day. You can do six Beast Tribe quests a day.


If a GC turnin or Ixali turnin is starred, it gives double experience. If you turn in an HQ item, you get double experience. So, HQing a starred item gives 4x the base experience.


Another way to level crafter/gatherers faster is to buy the engineering/survival manuals from your GC. These give experience boosts to crafting or gathering until either a set amount of time has passed, or you have gained a set amount of exp. The amount of exp is such that they are great very early on and useless after that. There are super upgraded versions of them in 3.0 aimed at level 50+ crafters, but they only last 10 minutes (I forget how long the low level ones last - an hour?) and cap at 300,000 experience gained, so it's hard to get full use out of them until you're around level 55.


If you are leveling crafters, you want to have access to an FC house vendor, which sells second tier mats (you can buy first tier mats from a vendor near the MB area in any of the four cities). Also, if you unlock all the beast tribes (requires level ~44, I think - you just have to do the initial quests, you don't have to gain faction with them), each has a vendor that sells mats for a crafter class. Kobolds sell ALC mats, Sahaghin sell CUL mats, Sylphs sell WVR mats, Amalj'aa sell BSM/ARM mats, and Ixali sell CRP mats. I expect that when they release the two new beast tribes in the expansion, they'll sell mats for the two missing classes (LTW and GSM), but no one knows for sure. The beast tribe vendors sell mats past tier 2 that can't be bought from any other vendor, like Oak Lumber, Mythril Ingots, and Undyed Velveteen. There are other vendors to know about too, especially Z'ranmaia in Limsa (Upper Decks, [11,8]) who sells mats you can't buy anywhere else (Grenade Ash, Morbol Vine, Sandworm Fang, etc), and the guild suppliers in each crafter guild.


And lastly, if you're leveling crafters, you want to first get all of them to level 15. At level 15, you learn important skills that are unique to each craft and can be cross-classed to the other classes. CUL and ALC in particular have the most important ones that totally change everything. CUL's is the only 0 CP touch action (100% quality, 50% success rate), and ALC's lets you turn Good and Excellent conditions into +20 CP.

There's another skill at 37 for each class, but only CUL's is useful (Steady Hand II: +30% success instead of +20% for only 3 CP more than Steady Hand). And again at 50 - CRP's level 50 skill is arguably necessary for all endgame crafting (finishing move, eats all Inner Quiet stacks and gives massive boost to quality based on number of stacks consumed), though they tried to reduce the impact of not having it post 50 in 3.0 (every class gets a worse version of the skill at level 51). There's another set at 54, but only CUL and GSM have useful ones (and you don't need both, they do the same thing in different ways - used on the first step to get a boost to progress. GSM's is better but costs 2 cross-class skill slots and is more finicky).

The most important cross-class skills are, arguably, CUL and ALC's level 15, then CUL's level 37, then CRP's level 50. The rest are nice, but those are extremely important to prioritize when leveling all crafts, and they're so important for endgame crafting. (Other really great ones include LTW's 15, WVR's 50, BSM's 15 and 50 (50 is an upgraded version of the 15 one), GSM's 50, ALC's 50, and one of: ARM's 50, CUL's 54, or GSM's 54 (they all serve the same purpose but work in different ways), loosely in that order.)


Leve info:

For crafters, leves are the fastest way, but they can be pricey, and you're limited on the number of leves you can do (you get 6 allowances per day, stackable to 100 before they stop accumulating). There are three types of leves: single turn-in, triple turn-in, and courier.

Singles are simple - make an item, return it to someone near the person who gave you the leve. You can spam them really easily by making a bunch of one thing, taking the leve, doing it, taking it again, etc. All Crafter leves are always available, unlike combat leves. Singles are the most efficient timewise.

Triple turn-ins are just like singles, except you need NINE TIMES the number of items, and you get 50% more experience than a single. 9x as much gil/time for 1.5x the experience... totally not worth it. But, these are the most efficient way as far as leve allowances go. The triples appear to require 3x the items and give 50% of the experience of the singles, but when you turn them in, you get the option of turning in more items for more exp, up to 3x. Hence the numbers above. I am of the opinion that triples are never worth it.

Couriers are just like singles, except the person you turn the item in to is located somewhere other than where you picked up the leve. Later on, all couriers are given in the city where the guild is for your craft, and the destination is the other location where you can get leves of that level (so like, The Observatory for level 35, Whitebrim for level 40, St. Coinach's Find for level 45). These give ~25-30% more experience than singles and are thus, in general, the most efficient gil-wise since you get the most experience per item.

The way to tell the difference between the three is the picture. I can't remember which is which, but if you look at the NPC you are supposed to turn the item into, if one is different from the rest, that's the courier. Most of the time, singles are the ones where you need 1 item, and triples are the ones where you need 3 items, but for some classes there are mats as turnins. For mat turnins, you generally need 3x for a single and 5x for a triple. Or, you can tell them apart by just looking at the exp reward - triples are listed as giving half that of singles (but really give 1.5x as much since you can turn them in three times).


HQing a leve turnin gives double experience. For triples, each HQ item gives a bonus that adds up to double if all items are HQ.